


All That Glitters

by lovetincture



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Missing Scene, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22920859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Their life in Florence is beautiful, glittering and perfect in every way. It makes Bedelia want to take her thumbnail to it, to dig it in and gouge the paint, stripping off the layer of gilt and laying it bare.Bedelia just wants a goddamn hamburger.
Relationships: Bedelia Du Maurier & Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	All That Glitters

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a conversation about [this fantastic gif of Gillian Anderson eating a hamburger](https://tenor.com/view/gillian-anderson-burger-eating-gif-5616057).

Their life in Florence is beautiful, glittering and  perfect in every way. It makes Bedelia want to take her thumbnail to it, to dig it in and gouge the paint, stripping off the layer of gilt and laying it bare.

She spends a lot of time drinking. It’s one vice Hannibal finds aesthetically appropriate, as long as she doesn’t get sloppy about it. (She would never). She sips a martini and tries not to recall everything she knows about Will Graham’s drinking habits, the picture she had cobbled together from casual comments that were anything but, while something that wasn’t  _ quite _ a man sat across from her in her carefully curated home.

She doesn’t think about it. She just never drinks whiskey, and that’s fine. She never liked whiskey anyway.

Hannibal goes out one night. He doesn’t volunteer where he’s going or what he’ll do when he gets there. He would tell her if she asked, she’s certain of that. He’d delight in telling her, in as much detail as she could stomach.

Bedelia doesn’t ask. She’s not sure if it’s because she doesn’t want to know, or because she resents it feeling so much like a favor, as if she doesn’t have a right to knowledge of her own life.

Resentment, there’s a constant companion. Almost as constant as the simmering buzz of alcohol in her veins or the low level headache brewing behind her eyes.

But Hannibal goes, and Bedelia breathes a sigh of relief when he steps out for the evening. She hates to live into a cliche, but she can’t deny the way her entire body sags just a few millimeters earthward. The devil’s in the details, and even now it’s the little things. The way she quits sucking in her gut and lets her face— _ crumple _ is the wrong word—it’s nothing so dramatic. It’s nothing more than a fine gesture, like flicking off a light switch. She turns off the scintillating, whip-sharp companion and lets herself fully inhabit her own exhaustion, how bone-deep tired she really is.

She wipes off her makeup with expensive cold cream, splashes water on her face and studies the dark hollows under her eyes. She touches her fingertips to thin skin that’s never quite how she remembers it, and when did she start to get  _ old _ anyway? She pulls her face into a smile just to watch it fall back into a frown, tracing her eyes over the severe curve of her mouth.

It’s an indulgence as fine as any other, a letting go that’s only possible for the unobserved: the world’s best-kept secret, that falling apart is its own luxury.

God knows Hannibal has had his share. Had it bloody and raw, splashed across the pages of American newspapers—‘Psychiatrist from Hell Takes a Bite Out of Baltimore.’ His breakdown had been showy and extravagant. A bit overwrought, like everything he does. Taken as though it was his right to do so, and how like a man.

Bedelia’s crumbling must be managed more carefully, stolen in fits and starts. In little snatches in the bathroom, in elevators alone. She doesn’t have the luxury nor the temperament for making a spectacle of herself, but she’ll take what she can get. She plans to scratch away a little more tonight, to steal it for herself.

As soon as she thinks it, Bedelia already knows what she wants.

She wants a goddamn burger.

Hannibal would make it for her, probably, if she asked. He would delight in the fact of her asking. The burger would be delicious, of that she has no doubt, although whether it would be beef is anybody’s guess. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to eat meat during their residence, choosing to content herself with seafood. The slippery, briny slide of it down her throat feels liquid in a way she recognizes, kin to the way she carries her grief oceanic inside her.

She’d had a lover once, in college. A woman, a poet. She’d have appreciated that sentiment, Bedelia thinks. She always did like the ocean.

Bedelia hated it, even then. She always did have a way of taking up with people who were somehow the least suited to her. Kind-hearted poets, refined cannibals. She’s Goldilocks at the table. Everyone seems to have too many sharp edges or not nearly enough.

Bedelia is picky tonight. She revels in her pickiness, for what does she have left to her but the frivolity of choice? She wants meat tearing beneath her teeth and doesn’t want just any burger. She wants the worst one she can find, cheap and bland and loaded with salt and carbs. She wants a burger that’s never even  _ met _ real food.

She wants to go to McDonald’s, wants it with a sudden fierceness that frightens her.

But what doesn’t frighten her these days? She’d be a fool not to be scared of Hannibal Lecter. Even before his grand tantrum, the bloodbath and bodies he’d left trailing behind him, Bedelia had known. Before anyone had known to care, there were years of listening to him sort through the puzzle box of his own mind, and what Bedelia knows would shock people.

Of course she’s afraid. Bedelia is many things, but foolish isn’t one of them.

Fear is less an old friend than a guest she can’t get out of her house, one she purses her lips at, making snide remarks in hopes that one day it will take the hint and leave her alone for good. Tonight she’s alone. She has the house to herself, and there’s nothing to stop her from joining the inky blackness outside her window, the glittering streetlights and the quiet hum of cars. The people who live and breathe and fuck and laugh (somehow—it seems impossible, doesn’t it?) Who do it without the pall of any of this hanging over them.

* * *

Florence is beautiful at night. They’ve been here for months, and the city still hasn’t lost its charm. Bedelia passes the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, taking the time to stand and feel dwarfed before it. She briefly entertains the fantasy of disappearing into the city, fading into it like a ghost. Hannibal would find her, of course. She’s sure of that, just as she’s sure she wouldn’t like whatever happened to her once he did.

She’d made a choice, back in the bedroom of her home in Baltimore. She’d pointed a gun at his heart with hands that never shook once and let him get dressed. She’d driven to the airport and boarded a plane. Her car is back there somewhere, she assumes, collecting parking tickets, probably impounded by now.

She isn’t quite so arrogant—not quite  _ sure _ enough—to say she’d do it again, but she hadn’t regretted it at the time. It feels as close to forgiving herself as she can manage.

Bedelia breathes in the scent of the Florentine streets, hot and acrid after the rain, the heat of the day still rising off the pavement in gouts of steam. She passes a family of tourists, a man and a woman with two identical blonde-haired children between them. Americans, like her. The girls chatter excitedly in the soft twangy tones of the Midwest with occasional excited shrieks that pierce the night sky. Their mother shoots Bedelia an apologetic glance, and Bedelia offers a small, polite smile in return. It doesn’t reach her eyes.

The McDonald’s is only a few blocks away, open 24 hours and thank god for that. It’s as unobtrusive as a corporate monstrosity can be, tucked away in a building that looks as storied and ancient as any of the others lining the Piazza della Stazione. She walks through an automatic door and finds herself face to face with familiar menus, everything sleek and covered in chrome.

She’d be embarrassed, if there was anyone here to see her, at the wave of nostalgia that grips her hard, a clenched fist around her heart. She doesn’t bother to read the menu. She orders a Big Mac with fries and a large Coke—she orders in English, never mind that her Italian is perfectly passable.

“For here or to go?” a teenager asks in accented English.

She briefly considers eating in the restaurant itself, but it feels too exposed, too wide open and cold under glaring fluorescent lights, afflicted with the same modernist architecture as fast food restaurants grasping at class the world over. She wants to be alone for this, wants to slink off into the dark to lick her wounds and gorge herself in peace.

She orders her food to go and takes it back home, clutching it to her chest, close as a secret.

* * *

She spreads her haul over the dining room table. There’s a limp burger that, true to form, doesn’t look as good as it does in the pictures and squashed, soggy fries. Her paper cup of Coke is half empty and already watered down. All things considered, it’s a truly shitty meal.

And it’s exactly what she wants.

Bedelia takes a bite of the burger, reveling in the uncomplicated taste of salt and fat. The patty itself is thin and anemic. The onions taste like nothing, and she takes another bite. She stuffs some fries in her mouth. They’re cold and mealy, and she eats some more, licking the salt and grease from her fingers.

She leans back and sighs. It occurs to her that she should savor this, what little freedom she’s been able to eke out in congealed fat and substandard fast food, but that’s what Hannibal would do.  _ Hannibal _ savors things. Hannibal makes things into events.

Bedelia doesn’t want a fucking event. She just wants to eat a goddamn burger.

She wants to eat her burger in peace and finish her book, and that’s exactly what she’ll do. She fetches the book from her bedroom, snagging it from the nightstand with greasy fingers, already flipping it open before she even sits down.

She eats her food with the minimum amount of attention, dragging her eyes across the page and letting pictures form in her mind. It occurs to her that she hasn’t done this since college, since staying up all night cramming for a final, the door to her dorm room open because everyone left their doors open in those days, and tinny music filtering in from the hall.

She thinks of that girlfriend again, the poet.

She finishes her sandwich first, saving the fries for last. A blotch of special sauce drips onto a page, and Bedelia wipes it off with a thumb, sucking it into her mouth. She idly wonders if that’s a killing offense in Hannibal’s mind. She only realizes she’s hit the bottom of her soda when a loud slurping sound jars her out of her reverie.

She sits back, uncomfortably full and already feeling sick in that way that only comes from ill-advised dates with the dollar menu. It somehow still feels like victory.

She marks her place and flips the book shut, getting to her feet with a stretch that cracks her spine. She shoves her trash back into the brown paper bag, the burger wrapper and ubiquitous red French fry carton. She crumples it up and tosses it in the trash can, right at the very top like a taunt. Like a declaration.

_ I’m still here, fucker. _

She goes to bed, turning on every last one of the lights in the house in her wake.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
